From: Michael Koppelman <lolife
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 12:13:23 -0600
To: Mike Simonsen <mikesimonsen
        AVSON

My $0.02 is that amateur observers can do two things very well.

1) Monitor everything as much as possible regardless of whether it is  
the flavor of the month or not. It's unglamorous and some will  
dismiss it as having low scientific value, but if we don't do it it  
won't get done and, dammit, we can't tell what will be interesting to  
future observers. My advisor, Roberta Humphreys, had observations of  
a galaxy that had a supernova recently. All of a sudden her old  
observations became very important. I would like to encourage all  
amateurs to ignore anyone telling them that what they are doing has  
low scientific value. Let's let the pros lose hair over that.

when the fun is over. We can and do provide valuable data on CV's,  
novae, SN and other events. We have more inches of glass (in  
aggregate) than the pros and greater coverage in longitude. Why not  
slew over to that new bright whatever and add a data point or two  
that maybe no one else got.

Cheers,
Michael
http://www.lolife.com/astronomy/


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